This week in car rental & carsharing

Twenty years of nonprofit carsharing in the Twin Cities, and in the end it just ran out of money. No dramatic pivot, no acquisition, no "exciting new chapter" press release — just couldn't raise enough to keep going. Evie was the kind of service urbanists love to cite as proof the model works. Turns out working and being financially sustainable are different things, and the gap between them is where most of these operations eventually end up.

Hourcar is closing, and now there's a community campaign to save carsharing in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Which is sweet. Also a little telling — because if the service were financially self-sustaining, you wouldn't need a campaign, you'd just need customers.

Nonprofit carsharing runs on goodwill and grants until it doesn't. Someone will probably step in with a pitch about equity and access. Whether that comes with a working balance sheet is the part nobody puts in the press release.

Four thousand people found out on a Tuesday afternoon that their car-free life just got a lot more complicated. HourCar, which has been running in the Twin Cities since 2005, is closing over a $625,000 funding gap. Not millions. Not some catastrophic structural failure. Just a number that sounds like a mid-sized office renovation budget.

And now someone is seriously looking at a 1958 Fiat. That's where we are.

Italy's carsharing market is apparently "at a crossroads", which is a polite way of saying most operators are bleeding money and wondering why demand never showed up the way the pitch deck promised. Rome and Milan got the apps, the stations, the press coverage. The cars sat there anyway.

The physics of carsharing in Italian cities — narrow streets, scarce parking, a culture that still likes owning things — didn't change just because someone launched a B-round. Turns out optimism doesn't cover the parking fees.

South Africa's rental companies are easing into hybrids and calling it progress, which is fair enough — charging infrastructure outside the main airports is patchy at best, and a Polo on petrol is already cheap to run. The economics just don't add up yet for full EVs, and nobody wants to hand a tourist the keys to something that might strand them somewhere on the Garden Route with a queue for a charger that may or may not be working.

Hybrids as a middle ground is the honest answer for now. Not glamorous, but probably correct.

Waymo is coming to Toronto in 2028, and Element Fleet will handle the parking lot side of the dream — maintenance, charging, vehicle readiness, all the unglamorous stuff that makes autonomous ride-hailing actually function. Which is probably the smarter place to be, honestly. The technology gets the headlines, someone else gets the invoice.

Kia's new carsharing pilot in Korea lets you book a PV5 van via app and it drives itself to you — no driver, just remote tech and a 5G connection. You drive it, park it wherever, and someone sitting in a control room somewhere drives it back to the garage.

Cute concept. The consortium list alone has eight organizations in it, which is usually a sign that nobody's quite sure who's responsible when the van parks itself into something.

Kia is running a remote-controlled carsharing pilot in Korea — meaning someone sits in an operations center and drives the car for you if needed, instead of, you know, a driver being in the car. It's framed as a first, which is probably accurate and also a very specific bar to clear. Whether this becomes a real service or just a very expensive press release dressed up as innovation is a question the trial will presumably not answer.